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Resolution: Make UX a Bigger Priority in 2018

January 18th, 2018

While many people are busy deciding which gym to join, diet to try or bad habit to break… the
new year is the best time to embrace some new habits that actually have a great ROI: namely,
beginning or expanding your team or company’s UX research efforts.

At the heart of every great product or service is good user research. The Nielsen Norman
Group, a UX Research and Consultancy firm, says ongoing UX activities, among them
Qualitative Usability Testing and Benchmark Testing, make the entire team’s work more
effective and valuable.

“At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep product-development
efforts on the right track, in agreement with true user needs and not imaginary ones.” -
Nielsen Norman Group

If you haven’t tested your site or app with real users in
the last 6 months or even a year, it’s time to start planning now. Getting a lay of the land
will help you to better understand your customer’s pain points, and make improvements for a
better year ahead.

Below are 3 ways you can get a jump on good UX for 2018.

Beginning with a Benchmark

As technology changes, so too does the way your customers and clients use the web. New
advancements in mobile, voice and artificial intelligence in 2017 have dramatically altered
the way people interact with their digital world. And many analysts predict the pace of that
innovation will increase considerably in 2018.

Before jumping head first into a major redesign, it’s helpful to understand where you’ve
been. Your current site or app is the customer’s main touch point with your company, and can
affect how they perceive your organization and its priorities.

A Benchmark User Experience Study will give you invaluable insight on how long it takes real
users to complete tasks on your site, whether they can complete them at all, and any major
errors or pain points they stumble upon along the way.

Use this data as a starting point. Meet with business stakeholders, product, marketing and UX
teams to strategize the priorities for the new year and what can be improved. You can focus
on simple improvements to an existing experience, plan out an entire redesign based on your
usability findings, or a combination of the two. It’s up to your business priorities to
determine the biggest needs and best returns.

Putting Your Prototype to the Test

You don’t need a degree in IT for somebody to tell you embarking on a major redesign is
costly, especially if you make some bad choices along the way. While good planning can help
you avoid a lot of costly missteps, you can guarantee better success with putting real
concepts out there for users to try.

At Userlytics, we’ve tested everything from simple wireframes and comps, to high fidelity
prototypes with back-end logic. It’s in your best interest to create concepts and then put
them in front of real users, to test your assumptions. The basic pattern should look like
this:

1. Create a concept, preferably based on a combination of identified user needs,
personas and user stories.

2. Build a prototype in whatever method you choose. Pick a tool or platform that will
allow you and your team to build quickly, change easily and iterate regularly. Start
with sketches and work your way up to more interactive tools, such as Sketch or
Invision.

3.Test with real users, asking for impressions and creating
usability tasks based on your user stories.

After a few cycles, you will identify major problems and work through them quickly to avoid
pricey mishaps down the road.

Competitor Analysis

It may seem counterintuitive, but planning a user test around the sites of some of your
biggest competitors can be hugely beneficial. In tight markets where the competitive edge is
razor thin, understanding your rival’s pain points can give you an advantage.

Testing a competitor’s site gives you insights into:

Their priorities as an organization

What they’re doing right to help earn business and customer loyalty

Where their website or app falls short, and where you can capitalize

Some of the their key differentiators, and how to differentiate your own business

You can also test your own site against a competitor, seeing which implementation of a
feature or design better resonates with users, or has unforeseen pitfalls. This is
especially helpful when a competitor has a feature you want to incorporate. Thus, you
can do an A/B or prototype test without having to spend your own development dollars!
Userlytics can help you with all of your user testing needs,
no matter how small or big the effort.